Denver, Colo.
– The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled against WildEarth
Guardians’ challenge to the National Park Service for its refusal to restore
wolves to Rocky Mountain National Park so as to better manage burgeoning elk
populations, and its decision to use sharpshooters to kill elk instead.

“Despite the
fact that wolves provide enormous ecological benefits to both elk and
ecosystems that human sharpshooters simply cannot, the court ruled in favor of
the sharpshooters,” said Wendy Keefover, Director of Carnivore Protection for
WildEarth Guardians. “Wolves would do a far better job of culling the weak, the
sick, and consistently moving sedentary elk away from fragile streams.
Sharpshooters will never have the same ecological benefits on the landscape.”

“Using tortured
reasoning, the Court has set a terrible new precedent for managing our national
parks,” said Mike Harris, Professor of Law at the University of Denver, Sturm
College of Law, and attorney for WildEarth Guardians. “Not only did the Court sanction the Park Service’s refusal
to consider the most natural of all solutions to the elk problem—wolves—it
opened the door to the most unnatural use of the parks by
allowing hunters into the Rocky Mountain National Park for the first time in
its nearly 100-year existence.”

The Park Service
recognized the need to manage overpopulated elk in Rocky Mountain National Park
in a December 2007 management plan, but the agency only briefly considered a wolf
reintroduction as the preferred option to control elk herds. Guardians had
argued that the agency’s decision-making process not only violated federal
planning mandates, its decision to use sharpshooters also violated the agency’s
organic act that established the Park Service as an agency that is supposed to prioritize
conservation.

“Wolves keep
getting a bad rap from agencies, Congress, and the courts, and we are so
disappointed that they cannot return to their ancestral home – even in a
national park where they are beloved by the overwhelming majority of citizens,”
said Keefover. “This outcome is going to be a huge disappointment to the over
70 percent of Coloradoans who want wolves back.”